Finished Guns, Germs, and Steel. Good book, if more
than a little repetitive. He's fond of setting up each of his chapters as a
mystery story, but by the end of the book, there's not very much suspense,
since the whole damn point of the book is that the same set of environmental
and geographic factors can explain lots of migrations and patterns of contact
in human history. Better package of domesticable crops. Better package of
domesticable crops. Better package of domesticable crops. The butler did it.
The butler did it. The butler did it. Over and over and over again.

That said, it is one of those neat books that give you a couple new ways of
thinking about things. There are certain principles he articulates -- at
great length -- that are useful clip-on lenses to have available. It certainly
has made me think about natural selection in a different fashion. But there's
also a really interesting and extended discussion on the nature of long-term
historical evidence, the kind of stuff you use to understand what happened back
before people had the technology to actually write down what was happening.
Some of the experiments to fix things in place and time are just wonderful --
understanding historical forest patterns from pollen deposits, sifting through
the forensics of bones and ancient garbage heaps, doing cladistics and backwards
induction on contemporary languages to reconstruct extinct tongues and figure
out their vocabularies in order to understand what crops and technologies they
had. It's also a really striking lesson in how much the world has changed
even in the last ten thousand years, what kinds of wild biodiversity it has
supported and how radically some of the most prominent plant and animal species
have readapted as humans increasingly affected their environment.